If I knew the answer to that, I’d save myself a lot of angst. Picking a title is easy. Picking the right one, not necessarily so.

Who picks the title? Sometimes it’s me. From my initial conception, Flirting with Pete was Flirting with Pete. Same with Lake News, Heart of the Night, Not My Daughter, and The Vineyard. My publisher picked other titles, like Coast Road and Family Tree. My agent came up with others, like An Accidental Woman and A Woman’s Place. Any title has to be vetted; while titles cannot be copyrighted, if a title has been recently used on another book, I avoid it. That said, way back when I was writing category romance, my editor called with a title suggestion that I vetoed, to which, undeterred, she said, “Oh, okay, no problem, we’ll use it for another writer.”

Book titles arrive different ways. Some crop up at the get-go, even before I start writing a book. Others come when my publisher reads the opening of the book and a word or phrase pops up that is perfect. Others take longer to find.

Young chick, old boots. That’s my theme here. As 2013 fades to 2014, it’s only natural to think about ending the old and beginning the new. But is that what really happens?

Not in my book. And I mean that both literally and figuratively. I don’t see that we end and begin. Life is a continuum. What we do today is colored by what we did yesterday. We appreciate what’s in front of us all the more for what’s behind. We are the sum of our parts.

Readers feel this. You’ve been engrossed in a book for however long it takes to read it and then, suddenly, the characters are gone. You write me asking what they’ll do now and whether they’ll ever be back. But if you miss them, think of what I’m feeling when I finish writing a book.

Take Sweet Salt Air. I’ve been living with Charlotte and Nicole and Leo and his dog Bear for a year and a half, so finishing the writing and having to let them go is bittersweet for me, too.

Let me make one thing clear. I don’t blog to express a political opinion. As a novelist, my taking a stand on anything political or religious is disastrous. When I talked here last week about civil discourse, it was to vent not about what we say but how we say it.

So there you go – one reason why I blog. I blog to vent about something, be it civil discourse, airport security, or plastic bags.

But there are other reasons. I mean, it’s not like I’m sitting around with nothing to do. I have to put blogging on my calendar, or else it gets lost in the shuffle of the daily writing, in this case, of Sweet Salt Air.

A book title either hits me, or it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, I defer to my publisher. After all, a title is a marketing tool, and they’re the marketing experts. Of my last five books, from FAMILY TREE to the present, the only one I came up with myself was ESCAPE, but that was a no-brainer. ESCAPE was about … escape! From the first, that was the only title I could see on the cover.